


Dictator's Cut: Soft Targets

by glinda4thegood



Series: Dictator's Cut: Missing Scenes [2]
Category: Soft Targets (1982)(BBC)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-18
Updated: 2011-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-19 13:11:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glinda4thegood/pseuds/glinda4thegood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the DVD collection, <b>Helen Mirren at the BBC</b> liner notes: <i>Helen Mirren and Ian Holm star in this (Play for Today) Stephen Poliakoff production about two people who find themselves exiles in their own way. Alexei Varyov is a Soviet journalist who is paranoid of the British Home Office . . . he bumps into and can't help being drawn to Celia Watson and is soon whisked into an unforgettable world . . . meeting all sorts of eccentric people along the way.</i><br/>Fic spoilers the storyline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dictator's Cut: Soft Targets

The nurse hands Celia two tablets and a paper cup of water, turns away and shuts off the light.

Celia holds the tablets in her hand. She drinks the water, crumples the cup and releases it in the general direction of her bed stand. She's not sure why she doesn't swallow the drugs. She won't sleep without them, and Celia wants to sleep, wants to shut everything off for a while.

Wanting to shut everything off is the reason she's in this hospital bed, and Celia is mildly startled to find she is wary of giving in to the desire again, even on a small scale.

If he hadn't come tonight, would she see this so clearly? Celia isn't sure she would.

 _Alexei Varyov._

Nicholas is forever turning up with strays. It amuses him to enrage Frances. The first time she sees Alexei, clearly latest victim of Nicholas' perverse humor, Celia is already evaluating the ways other people find to kill themselves.

Alexei watches her as she cleans up the mess Frances' party guests have left, eyes and body simultaneously interested and wary. His gaze and posture remind her of the way deer behind a zoo enclosure look at people, half-domesticated, half-wild, with nowhere to go if people offer threat rather than food. He seems more prepared for threat. He is not prepared for English decadence and shrill harridans. Yet he follows them to breakfast, follows the outstretched hand with cautious interest.

He is quietly attractive, Celia thinks at breakfast, and very lonely. She recognizes this in others easily, as a woman recognizes another wearing her scent. It's too late for this observation to matter. Her vision of the world narrows by the hour, focuses on a single point, a single question.

She forgets effortlessly, the men she knows intimately, the woman whose body is as familiar as her own. They blur at the edges, lose substance and individuality. Personalities and bodies overlap. Frances is only a sketch in her memory now, a two-dimensional representation of the selfish, greedy, strident, passionate woman who takes so much, so effortlessly. The booze and pills seem to do at least part of the job she hopes for. Only Alexei remains distinct, and even he seems like a story she writes in her mind.

Celia stares into the dark and writes a new story. Each fact is true, but like the best stories, the meaning of these facts enlarge, assume mythic overtones.

This serious man who says he is not a spy, spies on her. He follows her, watches her. His eyes, when he finds her at her job, lack the cruel selfishness she sees in other men's eyes. When she leaves the restaurant with him she has already decided on pills and booze, has already decided she will not return to her bedroom at Frances' flat, her job, her empty life.

She stays the night with Alexei because she's already there, because his loneliness spills into words and she can still listen. His rooms provide a neutral, if untidy waiting room.

She sleeps with him because she's there. After all the talk he shows a charming, politely masculine interest in her body that fails to make her feel any less distant, but unexpectedly deepens her feeling of calm.

After sex, she lies on her stomach and watches his profile. _This is who I am not,_ he says. _This is who I would like to be._ She wonders if her life would be different if she could finish those sentences for herself.

The story she writes now may answer those questions. _Don't worry everything will change,_ she tells Alexei. It's a polite lie, to ease the distress she sees in his gentle eyes. _Everything_ will never change.

But _some_ things might.


End file.
